Playwriting 411

Every Monday and Wednesday, instead of going to Krannert to work with Tom, I will go to 333 in the Armory for ‘Playwriting 411’. It’s a second semester playwriting course, but I’ve been e-mailing with the instructor Tom Miller and he’s given me the readings from the prerequisite course and last semester’s syllabus so I’ll be catching up independently. Mr. Miller has also offered that I can fully participate in all the class discussions and assignments not simply sit and observe.

Wednesday was my first day, because this past Monday was MLK Day. The Armory has a few rooms that you can only get to through specific staircases and Tom had told me that I should go to the side across from the business building, the “northwest” corner. Students are back and it is a pain getting around campus, especially with the weather. I got to the armory with a whopping eight minutes to spare. I was calm, but then realized that the business building is actually on the southeast side, so I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going. I figured I had a 50-50 shot of going through the right doors so I entered through the business building side. I picked the wrong fifty percent. Thankfully I found a map after wandering through a few different hallways and I ended up to my three o’clock class just in the nick of time.

I walked into class, but there was no instructor, and only two other students sitting in the class. I started to check through my folder to make sure I was in the right place. One of the two boys must have recognized my confusion, and told me that Miller was probably on his way, and that it’s a really small class. I took a seat and waited.

About five minutes later Mr. Miller showed up. He brought over the materials from last semester for me to photocopy and return to him on Monday. The first class was fairly brief. We all introduced ourselves, the other two students who were there are both seniors in Creative Writing at the U of I. There’s another girl apparently, Jillian, who I’m pretty sure I’ve met before. She’s in theatre at the U of I, and is always, always late. We discussed our expectations for the semesters, our assignments, and what we wish to improve on through the course. He pointed out that our syllabus only covers the next three weeks. He likes to structure the course around what his students want, and it’s particularly easy with such a small class.

We received our first two assignments. We have to have a name of a play published in the last two years that we’d each like to read. The entire class will read the plays each person selects. He gave us a list of websites and festivals to check for scripts we’d like to read. Our next assignment is actual writing. We listened to a piece of music, but we weren’t told the title or artist. We have to write a three to five minute scene (in a well written script each page should correspond to roughly a minute) based on what we heard. We’ll be reading our pieces aloud and doing a class critique on Monday.